Re: NSMenu* and NSPopuUp* issues

[Philippe C . D . Robert]

On Thursday, March 27, 2003, at 02:04  Uhr, Chris Hanson wrote:
> At 1:03 AM +0200 3/24/03, Serg Stoyan wrote:
> >   I suppose, that horizontal menus in OS X is for MacOS compatibility
> >   rather than usability. That is, for easy moving old MacOS users to 
> > OS X.
>
> I think you suppose incorrectly.
>
> The screen-edge menu bar is one of the most significant usability 
> achievements of the last 25 years.  Apple's not going to throw it out 
> unless the alternative is *very* substantially better.  While 
> OPENSTEP's menu palette has some of the same usability advantages when 
> it's bound to a screen edge, it isn't substantially better.

This has been discussed a lot, and I am not sure we want this thread to 
come up again here, but I cannot resist replying...:-)

Apple's horizontal menu bar works good on small screens (even on my 12" 
iBook it is a pain to use, for me at least), but if you use large 
resolutions and/or multiple screens it becomes horrible to use. It is 
no wonder that most of the new GUIs which have been developed later in 
time targeted for systems with larger screen sizes used to avoid this 
kind of menu style. Irix comes to my mind or BeOS or even Windows 
(menus attached to single windows suffer from other issues). Other 
systems which had a Mac like menu moved partially away from it, like 
TOS for example.
So I guess Apple could just not drop all of their well known UI 
elements which "define a Mac" (the 1 button mouse falls into the same 
category), and from a PR and marketing perspective this might even be 
correct.

But this is just my $0.02 ...:-)

-Phil
--
Philippe C.D. Robert
http://www.nice.ch/~phip